All people should be cared for in America

Posted by ( cobra ) on July 15, 2008 at 5:31 pm

Reasonable & Fair,
I absolutely agree but how fair is it for those from the Southern Hemisphere to come here illegally and demand amnesty with those that wait overseas for years and play by the rules? Immigration should be based on need. We can only absorb so many low skilled immigrants. I can’t imagine what a burden the American Tax Payer would have had to absorb if the McCain/Kennedy amnesty had passed. Millions of those people would now be eligible for public assistance with the down turn of the economy. It would have been a complete disaster. Fortunately the American People spoke up and shot it down. Comparing immigration of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to today is just ridiculous. There is absolutely no comparison. Don’t recall anything in the history books were illegal Europeans came here by the millions and demanded their right to Citizenship. Mr. Diaz comment about community cleansing is offensive to me but that’s what is expected from the likes of his ilk. They take absolutely no responsibility for their plight when faced with deportation. It is always someone else’s fault. They never blame their home countries for their plight. If their home country had an economic plan other then assisting their poor citizens to move north I may have some sympathy for them. But they continue to blame US for their problems. Sorry, my compassion ran out 5 years ago when I had 17 people living next to me in a 4 bedroom house. Hispanics should be experts on community cleansing. They have been doing it in black community in Los Angeles for years.

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Posted by ( MikeG ) on July 15, 2008 at 11:55 am

Vincent, I hate to say this, but you sound like you just fell off the banana boat. 

You try to make your letter a history lesson for Americans who, you infer, refuse to recognize the “hyphenated” nature of our country today, and ask the question “did [our] ancestors call themselves “hyphenated” Americans, or just Americans.”

Well, I can easily answer that question, Mr. Diaz.  My ancestors called themselves Americans, as I call myself an American.  Oh sure, at first they considered themselves English, but once they fought for and won independence from England, they no longer called themselves English; just Americans.  In fact, most people who have immigrated here from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, I wager, eventually called themselves just Americans whether they came from Ireland, Italy, Poland, Norway, Armenia, or wherever.  They came here, many through Ellis Island in New York, and many were given (OK, you can claim this was a bit overbearing; I agree) American-sounding versions of their family names, and then released into the general population where they lived, worked, reproduced, and adapted to their new home.  They weren’t hyphenated-anything, in those days.  Oh yes, they may have lived in ethnic communities sometimes, but just as many moved West and to other parts of the nation and, while they added their cultural diversity to our landscape they adapted, and were assimilated, learned English, and became “Americans.” Not a single hyphen in the group. 

My ancestors came from Europe.  In the early days of this country, except for “native” American tongues, the languages spoken were mostly English (with an English accent), French, and Spanish, in keeping with the cultures who colonized this continent.  “American” wasn’t a language then, and is only considered today to be an amalgam of various languages that have influenced our speech patterns until we have the dialects we recognize as “American” today.  The English like to say that we are two countries separated only by a common language; they think OUR accent is cute!

Anyway, back to your point: For those of us who are old enough to remember, it really wasn’t until the civil rights movement in the sixties that hyphenated citizens started to show up in our midst.  Most of us before then, and most of us now, consider ourselves to be just “American”, not “German-American,” or “Anglo-Saxon-American” or any other hyphen.  We recognize our roots, but this is our home, this is where our loyalties lie, this is the ground we consider sacrosanct, and the place which we would defend to our last breath.  Our individual and collective cultures and ancestry are the basis upon which this country finds its strength and resilience today.  Our vitality and diversity are recognized and recognizable without the need for specifying which cultures have come here to participate in this melting pot called America.

So I guess my message is this:  I don’t care if you’re brown, yellow, black, white, or purple.  If you’ve come here to become an American, then DO IT!  Add your culture to what you’ve found here, but don’t expect America to become a home away from home for your race.  You either consider THIS your home, and do what you can to not only embrace it but make it better, or you will continue to be considered an outsider and a visitor from another land.

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